Beverage

Leading Distributors Powering the Bottom Line

Softeon's WMS product has been instrumental in our dealing with the growing number SKU's and Suppliers. The visibility of the products and warehouse activities is tremendous.

Paul Holton
VP Operations
Ben E. Keith Beverages

Softeon has provided us a software solution that improves every aspect of our warehousing and distribution operations. They have designed a warehouse management system for us that will allow our company, and any other beverage distributor, to stay on the leading edge of distribution and excellent customer service.

Jim LaRose
President
The House of LaRose
(Anheuser-Busch InBev)

Click here to view the introduction of Softeon's beverage solution »

Your issue: increased need for distribution and operational excellence. Given the consolidation taking place among large breweries and beverage bottlers around the world, some of the pressures that you will face include:

Increased competition
Mergers and consolidation across distribution centers, change of ownership, territories, etc.
Flat, organic market growth
Complex inventory and SKU management issues
Increase in SKUs due to the merger of breweries, bottling companies, imports, and alcoholic/non-alcoholic brands, while capacity of DCs remain the same
Rising labor and operating costs

Softeon's solution consistently delivers, with deep, industry-specific functionality and advanced, web-native technology that reduces implementation costs, maximizes flexibility, and has unique capabilities that increase ROI. Softeon's real-time WIP dashboards eliminate bottlenecks in the picking and loading process during progression of pick waves, ensuring timely loading of trucks. The Slotting & Optimization module identifies optimal product placement by evaluating user defined preferences and constraints. The load planning dashboard helps configure and optimize pallet makeup for picking and loading using sophisticated rules, using constraints like package mix, brand, customer specific configurations, cubage, bay size and more. The end-to-end integrated solution is governed by a sophisticated Route Accounting System that supports complex order processing for product, pricing/discount configuration and real-time order status and visibility. Highly accurate inventory control is possible through ASN interfaces from the brewery or bottling plant, ensuring accurate receiving and putaway, sophisticated, rules-based cycle counting, replenishment features, and more.

Beverage System Modules:

RAS · route accounting system

Softeon RAS combines sales order and inventory management, financial accounting, and route maintenance/reconciliations into a single real-time, enterprise-wide application that increases operational efficiencies for beverage distributors. It provides real-time, transaction-based inventory management across all warehouse locations, enables tighter inventory control, and speeds up route reconciliations. With seamless integration to the Softeon WMS as well as popular business suites such as Roadnet Transportation Suite, Microsoft Dynamics, QuickBooks, and MAS 200/500, beverage distributors get a state-of-the-art, end-to-end solution that optimizes sales, warehousing, and delivery functions across the enterprise.

WMS · warehouse management system

Softeon WMS is highly configurable, with advanced capabilities that drive efficiency in receiving, putaway, order picking and other functions such as replenishment, returns and cycle count. Advanced functionality includes support for paperless warehouse operations, voice picking, use of dynamic, optimized pick paths and order picking synchronized with delivery truck loading plans (both traditional and side-loaded trucks). It also provides comprehensive inventory control capabilities that enable real-time management of inventory by location, SKU, lot/batch code, "born on" date/code date and expiration date, significantly improving accuracy and reducing shrinkage and costs associated with obsolete or expired inventory.

TPM · truck planning module

Softeon TPM automatically creates optimized delivery truck plans integrated with both customer pre-orders and route-specific sales forecasts (peddle sales). It includes powerful graphical tools for truck route and load planning. The system drives labor efficiencies in loading operations and delivery route stops for pre-sales and peddle-sales scenarios. It also provides for powerful rules to handle different truck configurations (mix of loads by stop and by route), combo loads, etc.. The system offers real-time integration to RAS and WMS to handle returns.

DSD · direct store delivery

Softeon DSD system is backed by powerful Smart Client mobile applications that provide: visibility to loads in bays for effective delivery, checker management for loads in and out, invoices at the customer site with signature capture, driver settlement process (uploads of receivables for reconciliation by host systems), and mobile/PDA-based order capture. It interfaces with popular mobile-device-based delivery functionality provided by beverage manufacturers.

Key Features:

An Integrated System

Inventory Control

Operational Efficiency

Integrated Order Picking
and Truck Loading Processes

Increase Route Sales

Ease of Integration

Universal Platform

Comprehensive Inventory
Control Capabilities

Highly Configurable
Warehouse Management

Tools that Automatically Create
Optimized Delivery Truck Plans

State-of-the-Art Route Accounting System and Flexible Interface Capabilities

A Powerful and 'Native' Task Manager

An Integrated System with solutions from order management, route accounting, load planning, warehousing and delivery with integration to software such as A/B Mobility.

Inventory Control supporting real-time location management, lot/batch and expiration date control.

Operational Efficiency that is an intuitive easy-to-use, web based, paper-less system that provides an efficiency improvement of 35% or more using technologies like voice based picking, sophisticated task management, slotting/simulation tools, load planning and real-time inventory visibility.

Integrated Order Picking and Truck Loading Processes
An intelligent, graphical system that optimizes efficiency in the warehouse and on delivery routes.

Increase Route Sales
Mobile sales and delivery systems, integration to software such as A-B Mobility and accurate tracking of sales performance, all of which provide better customer service and reduce inventory re-conciliation issues.

Ease of Integration
Softeon supports the major industry standard integration protocols, including a certified interface to SAP. It handles EDI, ASN's and in-bound and out-bound e-commerce transactions. Softeon's product integration leverages industry specific templates; for example, Softeon includes an Electronics industry specific template, which uses Rosetta Net Partner Interface Process (PIP) framework. This template-based WMS rollout approach simplifies integration to external client systems and large ERP landscapes.

Universal Platform
One of the biggest advantages of the Softeon solution suite is the open and flexible product architecture - based on Service Oriented Architecture framework, distributed component design, web-based with zero footprint client access. This allows 3PLs to take a centralized approach to managing multiple clients/multiple locations and yet perform distributed solution deployments, as the individual locations need only a browser to manage all their transactions and day-to-day operations.

Comprehensive Inventory Control Capabilities that enable real-time management of inventory by location, SKU, lot/batch and expiration date, significantly improving accuracy and reducing shrinkage and costs associated with inventory that becomes obsolete or past its expiration/freshness date.

Highly Configurable Warehouse Management Capabilities that drive efficiency in putaway, order picking and other functions like replenishment, returns, cycle count etc. Advanced functionality includes support for paperless warehouse operations, voice picking, use of dynamic, optimized pick paths and order picking synchronized with delivery truck loading plans (both traditional and side loaded trucks).

Tools that Automatically Create Optimized Delivery Truck Plans, which are integrated with both customer pre-orders and a route-specific sales forecast. These tools include operator-friendly visual loading diagrams, and drive labor efficiencies in both loading operations and delivery route stops in pre-sales and peddle sales scenarios

State-of-the-Art Route Accounting System and Flexible Interface Capabilities complete our end-to-end offering for beverage distributors. It supports complex order processing for product/pricing/discount configuration and real-time order status, from inception through post fulfillment. Other features include state-specific rules, tax computation and invoicing. Alternatively, interfaces to popular route accounting systems are available for our WMS to work in existing landscapes.

A Powerful and 'Native' Task Manager that enables auto/manual task assignments, prioritizes tasks, provides supervisory control to pre-assign tasks, perform resource balancing and also tracks productivity on a real-time basis, bringing in a high degree of operational efficiency to the warehouse.